Rant – Move Over Dennis Miller – I’ve Got Some Things to Say About Health, Fitness and Nutrition

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Time to get some things off my chest about health, fitness and nutrition. You may not agree with all (or any!) of these, but hopefully, they’ll make you think!

Rant #1 – Why Does Everything Makes Us Fat Or Causes Cancer?

It seems like we can’t eat or drink anything these days without being told it’ll make us fat or cause cancer.

We try to eat canned tuna to eat less fat and we get mercury poisoning. We eat fruit and vegetables for the vitamins and fiber and the pesticides give us tumors. We eat chicken and we get mad chicken disease and now farm-raised salmon will give you swine flu. Wine is either good or bad for you depending on whether you eat it with cheese or with crackers!

What ever happened to the good old days when we got fat from eating too much pie and we got sick from eating too much paint off the walls? Now I hear you can get cancer from worrying about getting cancer.

Rant #2 – Low-Carb Beer

Do beer companies seriously believe that they can get people to believe that they’re selling diet beer? With all their talk about who has 1 gram less carbs in a tablespoon than the other, they seem to forget that it’s actually the ALCOHOL in their product that makes you fat!

Not only does alcohol basically snuff out your fat-burning enzymes, it’s also preferentially stored as fat and seriously messes up your body’s production of muscle-building hormones such as testosterone.

I guess saying “low-carb” does sound better than saying “watered-down.” Next they’ll be adding caffeine and Gatorade to it and be calling it “high-performance beer.”

Rant #3 – “Nutrient of the Week” Bandwagon Marketing

Did you hear? Froot Loops are now healthy because they contain added calcium! They contain added calcium because someone decided to add a big bag of chalk to the sugary goop they make it out of. You can now feed it to your sugar-crazed A.D.D. kids with a clear conscience because it’s now healthy for them because it has CALCIUM.

I’m waiting for the day when a clever marketer takes a piece of plain blackboard chalk and sells it as a “Calcium Stir Stick” for your coffee.

I also just love it when a product that’s been around for 30 years suddenly proclaims it’s now “fat free” or “low-carb” even though it’s always been and everybody knows it. “Fat Free” or “Low-Carb” water is not the revolutionary product it’s made out to be.

But what really takes the cake are vitamin companies that proudly jump on the nutrient bandwagon crying “See! We’ve had it all along!” when their pills are so tightly compressed and unabsorbable you can still read the brand stamp on them when they come out the other end (I have it on good authority from a certain Port-o-Potty specialist I know)!

Rant #5 – Making Low-Carb Foods Out Of Foods That Shouldn’t Be Low-Carb

Orange juice just shouldn’t be low-carb. I don’t care what they say. If I want low-carb orange juice I’ll add my own water instead of paying the juice company to add it for me and charge me extra for the privilege. That’s all I have to say about that.

Rant #6 – Trying to Pass Unhealthy Foods Off As Healthy

Pork Rinds Lite – now with 25% less fat, sodium, cholesterol, lead and cyanide.

Even if you take some token percentage of the bad stuff out of a bad food, it’s still going to be a bad food. It’s like buying reduced fat lard – it’s still lard. It just has a nicer name now. Anyway, it’s so easy to reduce the fat in a serving by making the serving smaller, what’s the point? Who’s going to sit down and eat just 3 cheese doodles?

When I eat a food I know is bad, I know it’s bad but sometimes I’m just going to eat it anyway. I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to sue you for making unhealthy food. Nobody is putting a gun to my head to eat it. I don’t believe for a second that slightly reducing the “perceived naughtiness” of a food somehow now makes it “healthy.” So please don’t try and sugarcoat this delicious garbage unless it’s for flavor.

Rant #7 – The Amazing Diet Patch

The only way you’ll lose weight with the Diet Patch is if you put it over your mouth. ‘Nuff said.

Rant #8 – Expensive Urine and Other Supplement Bashing

There are doctors even to this day who believe that taking vitamins will only result in expensive urine. They believe that you can get all the vitamins and minerals you need in a balanced diet. Unfortunately, the only balanced diet some people get is when they’re trying to carry 3 dishes to the table in one hand.

Jumping straight to prescribing costly drugs to mask symptoms to people who are probably just desperately in need of basic nutrition is the epitome of expensive urine, in my opinion.

And then there’s creatine. You may remember the buzz a few years ago when some of the “don’t-confuse-us-with-the-facts” media jumped on a story about the deaths of some high school wrestlers. They were taking creatine to improve their performance so obviously it must have killed them. It certainly wasn’t because they were taking long steam baths in rubber suits and exercising intensely without drinking adequate water in order to desperately make weight for a wrestling meet. It must have been the horrible supplement that did it because nobody has ever died from catastrophic dehydration or heat stroke, right?

Let me clarify – there is nothing dangerous about creatine. It’s a natural substance already found in your body in quantity. It’s found in every piece of meat that you eat. The only way creatine could hurt you is if someone drops a bucket of it on your foot.

Supplements only seem to make the news when somebody has something bad to say about them, regardless of whether it’s true or not.